At Weddings and Wakes

...D 16: 22 May 1992 Commonweal...

...Bob Dailey, Lucy's husband, shrewdly evaluates the source of Momma's hurtful affections in telling the story of her prodigal son...

...While an unearthly light and shadow suffuse the streets and rooms, the smells, sounds, and Commonweal 22 May 1992: 15 voices of a familiar American landscape establish the thick texture of these lives...

...At the party, barely pubescent cousins sneak into the liquor, children scout out adult duplicities, the unwanted solicitousness of little-known relatives goes undeflected, mothers and fathers drink and dance with a youthful intimacy, and the dark comers of family history and the usual salacious gossip are given new life...

...Her sister, her husband's first wife, died in childbirth in the same apartment...

...It wouldn't hurt him to show a little more caution...

...Peace was annihilation and to say that love could fade, that loss could heal, was to admit forever that there would be no return of the dead," imagined one teenage protagonist...

...Despite the brokenness and gentle absurdity of the individual lives involved, May's wedding/wake comes to transcend all temporal confusion...

...In "The Dead," the accident of hearing an old ballad calls a middle-aged woman back to the sharp passion of an adolescent love that ended in death...

...At the same time, however, what is disconnected and incomplete about human love and life is miraculously made whole through the frame May's death imposes on the scene...

...That was not what had so thoroughly hardened her heart...

...Indeed, we are incomplete without them, or so thinks the otherwise gently skeptical Bob Dailey...

...McDermott is meticulous with all the dowdy details of this unpretentious middleclass rite...

...In so doing, the novel is eager to show how people are as much tied to one another by shared loss as by any transitory triumph or joy...

...McDermott turns the homely artifacts of everyday life-in this case Chiclets, butterscotch Life Savers, Syrian bread, the Reader's Digest and old Playbill magazines-into talismans and portents...

...Unsatisfactory marriage, alcoholism, disfigurement, and early death all haunt this stolid, intense, striving middle-class family...

...As a family the Towne women are a formidable and brooding presence...

...Love me, love my parents...

...The Townes do not so much rise above circumstance and history as they hallow them...

...Her son John, handsome and fatally charming, has been exiled for his incorrigible drinking, relegated to an annual Christmas visit...

...In this shadowy world lineage carries weight-we inherit both strengths and weaknesses, and often our strength is also our weakness...

...A man who runs out of money at the end of the month is no manager...

...But there was something they [the Towne women] gave him, too, with all their ghosts, something he couldn't deny: they provided his ordinary day, his daily routine of office, home, cocktails, dinner, homework, baths, and twenty minutes of evening news with an undercurrent-it was like the low music that now played on the kitchen radio-that served as some constant acknowledgment of the lives of the dead...

...Not, their father was now saying into the darkness as he drove, because of all the torment John had put Momma through in his wild days, oh no...

...It is a journey in time and history as well as geography...

...More than anything else, it is their "easy access to regret" that sets them apart and endows them with spiritual authority...

...One by one they were all becoming shades...

...This is most poignantly realized in the penultimate chapter, where the wedding of May-a former nun who unexpectedly finds love in middle age-is refracted through the reader's increasingly focused knowledge of the bride's impending death...

...At Weddings and Wakes seems an imaginative exploration of that sense of intergenerational identity, a turning away from the contemporary promise of selfdetermination toward the more lasting satisfactions of human connectedness and continuity...

...McDermott is intent on evoking the timelessness present in every passing moment...

...love what I come from and what I will, with no more choice or volition, become," the narrator observed in That Night...

...Alice McDermott takes us to very much the same place-even amid the tacky sincerity of suburban Long Island!-where the seemingly solid things of this world crumble before the elusive powers of human remembering and longing...

...McDermott is an elegant stylist who can tell a story from a variety of points of view, and she can get away with such luxurious sentiments and sentences...

...As with the opening scene in McDermott's previous novel, That Night, which propels the reader into the lives of an otherwise unexceptional teen-age couple, At Weddings and Wakes immediately sweeps the reader into the numinous world of the Townes...

...So when Momma and her stepdaughters-Aunt May, Agnes, Paul Baumann and Veronica still live at home-gather in her dark, cluttered Brooklyn apartment, there are many spirits to be appeased...

...All the familiar, sentimental songs are played and the traditional dances danced...

...At weddings and wakes we are allowed to say "forever...

...Weaned on Momma Towne's ruminative resentments, her stepdaughters-especially Lucy, mother of the three children whose wide eyes and sharp ears bring us into this enchanted world-can nurse a grievance with the same fierce devotion that their men milk a bottle of whiskey...

...At Weddings and Wakes reminded me of Joyce's great story "The Dead," with its haunting winter light and landscape, sharp social observation, and tribute to the bittersweet redemptions memory, desire, and longing afford...

...That regret is also, irrevocably, a shared history and very much a corporate identity...

...First of the month it's roses, last of the month daisies...

...stunning new novel, orchestrates the ceremonial gatherings of her four stepdaughters with a certain "papal dignity," the narrator tells us...

...All of us moving out to Long Island with the grass and the trees...

...Of the soon-to-be-married couple's unwary plans for the future-a future where inevitably every joy must be paid for in the hard currency of loss-Momma Towne is equally dismissive...

...What had done it, what had made her mad as hell, he said, was that the bastard had stopped.'She feels the same way about God...

...This search for "what part of love remains" in the face of death and the erosion of time was a crucial theme in That Night...

...It is unusual to read a contemporary novel so knowing in its acceptance of the boundedness of individual life and of life itself...

...Set in the early 1960s, the routines of the kitchen, followed by the small formalities of the "cocktail cart" anchor daily life...

...There is nothing unique or particularly exhilarating about May's modest church wedding and reception...

...McDermott kneads this domestic experience in a way that seeks to hold seeming opposites-sisterly love and jealousy, motherly pride and resentment, transience and timelessness-in tension...

...At Weddings and Wakes is a complex narrative that beguiles with the strong rhythm of its prose and the almost liturgical movement of its story...

...The dead are very much with us, thanks to the Towne women...

...Momma Towne's apartment is the focus of family life and lore, a shrine where a sacred creed is faithfully recited...

...We are also given a glimpse of the strained intimacies of more traditional family gatherings...

...My husband died right outside this apartment door," Momma Towne is fond of recalling, like a priest pronouncing the words of consecration...

...on reclaiming the past that, though seemingly invisible, colors every present emotion and thing...

...The novel opens with a bravado set piece in which the three young Dailey children are led by their fitful mother on the magical journey from their suburban home to Momma's fourth-floor walk-up...

...Of her daughter May's future husband's irritating habit of sending flowers, Momma Towne is as suspicious-and as unforgiving-as the proverbial Irish peasant...

...What the Townes inherit circumscribes their hopes, but is equally a gift-and can never be one without the other...

...The dead never leave us, Joyce seems to be saying, for in our "last end" we all share a common fate and perhaps even an imperishable identity...

...Without it, they would be cut off both from what joy they can hope for as well as, paradoxically, from their deepest, most individual selves...

...He was not so much unlike them, there were among the dead people he loved and missed and would not set his eyes on again, and the women's constant chorus of anger acknowledged that for him...

...Don't think I didn't notice," she announces in her brogue...

...His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling...

...She's a very Irish pope, to be sure...

...A regular vision of heaven," she says with her bitter wit...

...By allowing us to see May's ordinary happiness through the sharp focus of her death a mere four days away-a death as inexplicable as the love she had only recently found-McDermott returns us to the timelessness not of grand achievements, but of the humblest human desires, even failings...

...As Reynolds Price has written, "Nobody under forty can believe how nearly everything's inherited...